How to do a million watchpoints: Efficient Debugging using dynamic instrumentation

Abstract

Application debugging is a tedious but inevitable chore in any software development project. An effective debugger can make programmers more productive by allowing them to pause execution and inspect the state of the process, or monitor writes to memory to detect data corruption. This paper introduces the new concept of Efficient Debugging using Dynamic Instrumentation (EDDI). The paper demonstrates for the first time the feasibility of using dynamic instrumentation on-demand to accelerate software debuggers, especially when the available hardware support is lacking or inadequate. As an example, EDDI can simultaneously monitor millions of memory locations without crippling the host processing platform. It does this in software and hence provides a portable debugging environment. It is also well suited for interactive debugging because of its low overhead. EDDI provides a scalable and extensible debugging framework that can substantially increase the feature set of current debuggers. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.